This first appeared in Harness in 2005.

From the interstate, the frontage road is liable to appear suddenly. There it is, a little companion road running parallel to the highway. You might see a pickup truck on the frontage road wearing one of those homemade wooden canopies, a shingled look. You can see the driver as you zoom past, an oval blur of flesh and a left arm. It’s the kind of pickup truck you want to remember noticing, in case you later see a news bulletin about a serial killer in the area, police on the lookout for a particular kind of canopied pickup truck of such and such a make and model. I saw a truck just like that earlier, out on the frontage road. The next time you glance over the frontage road is no longer there. The frontage road comes and goes.

Sometimes the frontage road is what used to be the highway before the new modern highway supplanted it, making the frontage road a kind of shadow. As you speed by in your gleaming vehicle, you might see a much older car on the frontage road, an antique or close to it, something comically chugging along. For a moment you might be in love with the idea of the frontage road as a ghost highway outside time, especially if there’s mist or fog blanketing the frontage road. This is often the case as the frontage road is frequently several feet lower than the new highway.

Sometimes the frontage road runs right alongside the newer highway, just down a gravel or weedy embankment, and then on the other side of the frontage road there’s a small field, and then maybe there are some trees. These fields associated with the frontage road might contain tall grasses, usually more brown than green. This is where a body might be discovered. It might be a marshy area, there might be reeds, and volunteers could discover a body there after a grim and exhaustive search. This could also turn out to be a tiny ecosystem for a particular endangered species. If you saw some people with flashlights in the reeds or tall grasses you couldn’t draw any conclusions, although the temptation would be there.

Sometimes there are wooded areas beyond the fields or marshes that sometimes abut the frontage road. This pattern of new highway-embankment—frontage road—field of tall grasses or reeds—wooded area is surprisingly common, a common arrangement of spatial elements associated with the modern interstate. If you are driving on the interstate in the evening and glance over at this familiar scene, you could glimpse or easily conjure a shadowy figure in the failing light, half-emerging from the wooded area into the patchy mist of the field, maybe nothing more than a suggestive rustling. At these moments you might think thank goodness I’m not on the frontage road just now.

There are numerous reasons you might find yourself driving on the frontage road in the middle of the night. One thought that might occur to you is: Normally it’s me up there on the new highway, glancing down at a lonesome car on the frontage road. Now the lonesome car is me.

Driving on the frontage road is a completely different experience than driving on the interstate. On the frontage road it takes serious diligence to refrain from hunching your shoulders, even squashing yourself down so that you are barely peeking over the steering wheel. The frontage road encourages a driving posture suggestive of a great burden, perhaps the weight of remorse or of secrets or of some other oppressive emotional gravity, burdens that the interstate, by its nature, is prone to alleviate. For this reason passengers of vehicles on the interstate are liable to be the object of envy by people in vehicles on the frontage road, and vice versa.

A single car accident could occur as follows: Driver on the interstate falls asleep at the wheel or loses control due to drunkenness, the car veers off the highway and down the embankment, crosses the frontage road, bounces across the field, and plunges into the wooded area, is swallowed up by the wooded area, and hits a tree. This is the Jackson Pollock-style accident. Almost any imaginable incident involving both the interstate and the frontage road would begin on the interstate and end on the frontage road.